The Glow at the End of the Dial; Ira Glass Is, Um (Pause, Delete) . . . Listening: The Perfectly Edited World of His 'American Life.'

One minute after midnight, Ira Glass, host of the public-radio program ''This American Life,'' is huddled over his computer, editing an interview using digital software in his chaotic Chicago office. The voices on the tape are those of Glass and Alexa Junge, story editor of the NBC sitcom ''Friends.'' For more than four hours, Glass has been agonizing over every stammer, every breath, every millisecond between words in what originally was a 12-minute chat. ''Should I laugh there?'' he whispers to himself. ''No. I should not.''

The interview was for a local pledge drive. Ordinarily, pledge drives are viewed as the sixth circle of radio hell, an unending tape loop of cheery threats that victimize host and listener alike. Given the extraordinary success of ''This American Life,'' the fastest growing show on public radio, Glass might be expected to shun the business altogether. Instead, he has become the medium's most ardent fund-raiser, precisely because of promos like this one. His talk with Junge fleshes out a simple, droll premise: if public radio adopted the techniques of commercial television -- if there was more ''hanging out'' or if one of the news readers had a pet -- it wouldn't have to pester its audience for money. Junge's vision for the future is ''Less reporting, more sexy fun!''

''The first thing you're gonna need is a big couch,'' she says on the tape. Glass listens to the pause afterward, then snaps his finger where his response should be.

''A couch,'' his voice replies, after what is now a perfect, Bob Newhart-timed blink.

''Something big you can all sit on, um, while drinking coffee. . . . If you guys are tired of asking for money, get a group, put 'em on a couch, and make sure nothing gets in the way of them just sitting there.''

Much as he likes Junge's timing, Glass knows that her comments need paring to meet his standards: Should she breathe there? That ''um'' -- does it add meaning? He asks out loud, ''Does the 'um' work?''

Glass is talking to his computer. He does this all the time: swears at it, woos it, pleads for its cooperation. Hearing no reply, he deletes the ''um'' with a series of sweeps and clicks, then continues making jump-cuts, fiddling sound levels and deleting laughter.

Glass's success mirrors the rise of public radio as a whole. Over the past decade, as commercial airwaves have descended into a slough of golden oldies and grotesque political chatter, public radio's audience has more than doubled. Stations financed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now reach 22 million listeners, up 15 percent from just five years ago. And with ''This American Life,'' Glass, at 40, has become a one-man new wave.

He is near the end of a typical foodless, 15-hour day, in which he has spent much of his time calling former colleagues at National Public Radio to produce vignettes that illustrate Junge's theories. Ray Suarez has taped a 60-second ''Talk of the Nation,'' in which he asks his pet duck to ''weigh in on health care.'' Nina Totenberg, Bob Edwards and Noah Adams have recorded a sketch in which they all hang out and engage in Gen-X conversation about a ''Senate vote thingy.'' Adams needles Totenberg for having a crush on ''dreamy Trent Lott.'' (Totenberg replies, ''That is so not true!'')

Glass will work until 2 A.M., go home to catch a few hours' sleep, then return, wearing most of the same clothes, at 5:30 A.M. to play the promos with live commentary to Chicago's morning drive-time crowd (and to listeners in other cities over the next year). He sits in a colorless studio, his shoulders making slow, coquettish swivels at the microphone, beckoning readers to call in. ''My friend,'' he says, ''you've stayed around during pledge breaks, our least interesting programming. Look in the mirror, my brother. You are a hardcore public-radio listener. A lifer! So here's the number to call.''

The effort Glass puts into a pledge drive is only a shadow of the obsessive care he takes with ''This American Life.'' Each episode of his show, an hourlong collection of first-person stories, short fiction and the odd bit of poetry, explores a single theme -- Guns,'' say, or ''Other People's Mail.'' It is typically divided into three or four stories, or ''acts.'' An episode titled ''The Cruelty of Children,'' for instance, begins with a recording made on a school bus of Glass chatting with a first grader. The discussion is meant to be about libraries, but ineluctably turns to bullies, a pressing concern in every kid's life. The boy claims his school library lends out ''bully books'' -- books that teach children how to be mean. He insists, against all evidence, that one is called ''Bullies Make All the Rules.'' Glass, forever hovering between faith and bemusement, asks who would write such a book. The boy replies, ''Maybe the guy who wrote it was a bully himself.''

Nothing that follows is any nearer to proper, mainstream media. David Sedaris (who gained prominence when his ''Santaland Diaries'' was produced by Glass for NPR's ''Morning Edition'' in 1992) dryly recalls his cruelty to ''sissy boys'' when he was coming to grips with his own homosexuality. Ira Sher then reads some short fiction -- a sparse, chilling tale about a group of children who discover a man trapped in a well and leave him there to die. Next, Glass interviews Vivian Paley, a teacher and author, about how kids form rigid ''ruling classes'' even in kindergarten. The show ends with Louis Prima's rousing ''When You're Smiling.'' Somehow, the anecdotes add up to an idiosyncratic sociological whole.

There's no end to the raw material from which Glass may draw, because he has stripped away all traditional journalistic notions of what makes stories timely. He can therefore do entire shows about compulsive liars or Niagara Falls (including a tape of a man tumbling over the falls in a barrel, as well as another interview with a man whose job it is to haul dead bodies out of the water below). Glass calls his mission ''goony and idealistic'' -- to give voice to those outside the mainstream. Tragically, though, many will still plod through life unheard. In the warren of the show's offices, there's a box of submissions that no one has found time to formally reject. They start with lines like ''Love was not for Sam.'' Some aspire to greatness: ''By the age of 8, he was a professional eater.'' Others do not: ''I have written and performed several one-woman pieces, one of which involved a stripping clown.''

''This American Life'' made its debut on the Chicago public-radio station WBEZ in November 1995. From the beginning, Glass made it his business to compensate for the peculiarity of his show by being what he calls ''a pledge-drive powerhouse.''

''We didn't know how popular it was going to be,'' he recalls. ''We wanted stations to make more money off our show than it cost. The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.''

By brazenly pitching the show to marketing directors, Glass has been as much a boon financially as he has been creatively. Last year, Glass went on WBUR, Boston's public mainstay, and in a single hour raised $50,000 -- more than double the usual pledge amount. Although the show won a Peabody Award its first year, its future was never assured. ''We were already on 160 stations,'' Glass says, ''but NPR was hesitating to pick us up.''

Though many listeners refer to all public radio as ''NPR'' the way soda drinkers refer to Coke to mean any cola, ''public radio'' actually consists of two competing networks, NPR and Public Radio International, which is based in Minneapolis. They are the sibling rivals of American broadcasting -- now battling over control for a given time slot, now joining forces when the health of public radio is at stake. Although most public-radio stations carry shows from both networks, it's PRI, not NPR, that distributes ''This American Life.''

Actually, PRI might not exist at all had it not been for a monumental NPR gaffe: in 1983, the network turned down the opportunity to syndicate Garrison Keillor's ''Prairie Home Companion.'' ''NPR declined to pick up Keillor because there was an attitude that they had plenty of producers and plenty of talent back in Washington,'' says Stephen Salyer, PRI's president and C.E.O.They didn't want to be spending resources in the hinterlands.''

Frank Mankiewicz, who was president of NPR at the time, disagrees. ''We said no to that program because it was too expensive,'' he recalls. ''More important, I didn't like it -- and I don't like it now. It mocks the values of middle America; it's obnoxious and elitist, and it had no place on NPR.'' Today, ''A Prairie Home Companion'' is the most popular cultural program on the air. Two network vice presidents were reportedly let go in the wake of the decision.

In response to NPR's parochialism, executives from five major stations (including WNYC) founded something called American Public Radio, which later became PRI. It picked up ''A Prairie Home Companion.'' Currently, Keillor reaches more than 2.2 million listeners a week.

NPR and PRI continue to compete. But even after the Keillor fiasco, NPR's reluctance to distribute ''This American Life'' came as no surprise to some. Glass's voice doesn't have the softly authoritative cadence that NPR so enjoys in its news readers: it was crackly and, at times, uncomfortably intimate. Beyond that, Glass himself had worked at NPR since he was 19, when he produced promos as a summer intern. In later years he was a tape cutter, a producer for ''All Things Considered'' and an on-air reporter. Given his history with the network, there were old-school types, Glass believes, who simply couldn't abide ''This American Life.'' It was just Ira, and they'd known Ira since he was a kid. No one takes an ex-intern seriously.

''In the end,'' Glass recalls, ''they said, 'Well . . . we'll give you what PRI is offering. We'll give you that.' And this was the courting stage!'' He grabbed PRI with both hands.

Glass then scored a $350,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- more than twice what he had asked for. C.P.B.'s condition for such unheard-of generosity was simple: that Glass and WBEZ guarantee at least three years of programming. ''When we heard Ira, it was clear this wasn't something you give money for one year, then renew,'' says Rick Madden, C.P.B.'s vice president for radio. ''Sometimes you have to see what'll happen if a person gets freedom from fund-raising and time to percolate the idea.''

Not surprisingly, Glass regards this move as ''the single most competent piece of arts administration I've ever seen. They said, 'You have a political problem you don't even know you have; stations aren't signing up for your show because they don't think it'll be around in a year.' ''

''This American Life'' is more than surviving. Glass likes to say that ''it's the only program in the history of broadcasting to win the Peabody and the DuPont-Columbia awards, and be invited to the HBO Comedy Festival.'' Between 1996 and 1997, the show's audience more than doubled. At present, it's heard on 324 stations (with San Bernardino, Calif., just about to sign on) by more than 830,000 people. That's a 30 percent increase in listeners over the last year.

Since December 1995, when Newt Gingrich suggested eliminating all Federal funds for public broadcasting, C.P.B. itself has had a fiscal knife at its throat. Public radio, which absorbs $60 million of C.P.B.'s annual $250 million budget, has had to become more sophisticated about raising money.

''The old style was to say, 'If we don't get your 10 bucks, we're going off the air,' ''says Madden. ''But fund-raising has matured. We're getting in to major planned giving amore on the model of hospitals and symphonies. We're not a fly-by-night operation, so we don't need to act like one.''

No one embodies this change better than Glass. Local stations can't get enough of his ''revolutionary'' promos. ''We've taken his pledge breaks and spliced them into whole shows,'' says Johnette Alter, manager of on-air fund-raising at KERA in Dallas. ''And those programs -- pledge-drive shows! -- rated better than the shows they replaced.''

For Glass, there's material to spare. In one pledge segment, he noted the popularity of the theme restaurant Medieval Times and was forced to admit that aficionados of jousting, a sport that supposedly had been dead for 400 years, were still as numerous as WBEZ's listeners.

Glass interviewed a Medieval Times marketer, whose fund-raising advice came to three words: ''Newsmen on horses.'' This led to yet another vintage Ira Glass ''so I got to thinking'' sketch involving a mock battle between NPR's Carl Kasell and Corey Flintoff. ''Scavengers will dine on your bones!'' Flintoff cries. To which Kasell retorts, ''You will read the news from Hades, usurper!'' In the end, Flintoff is slain, whispering his final words in agony: ''I have served my liege with unbiased reports . . . and now, I die! For National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Corey Flintoff!''

Where comedy fails, bribery succeeds. Glass has spent whole nights delivering pizzas to pledging members in Chicago and Boston. He offers rub-on biker-style tattoos emblazoned with skulls and Gothic script spelling out ''Public Radio.'' This month, as a premium, he'll be giving out CD's of his show's greatest hits, a Rhino Records release called ''Lies, Sissies and Fiascoes: The Best of 'This American Life.' ''

But work is wearing Glass down. No two minutes of his office life pass without an interruption. Producers crack open his door to ask after the status of a segment; interns feel free to bound in with computer questions. And when there's no one else available, Glass interrupts himself, wheeling his chair around to send E-mail or return ancient phone calls. Up close, he's a medley of discrete moments, a series of phrases and gestures that don't add up to a unified man and never hold together for long. It takes a week of stressful editing to create a contiguous hour of Ira Glass.

But this week, he resolves, is going to be different; he's going to go home at a decent hour, try out some new electronic media, live in the city in which he lives. In the corridor outside his office, there's a freshly delivered computer -- a grape-colored iMac, since Glass likes his technology handsome. (He is anticipating his first-ever full hour on the Internet looking at something other than his own show's Web site.) Two days ago, he also had cable television installed. ''I now have the equipment to recraft my existence,'' he says, brightly jotting to-do notes in a little red book. ''This week . . . will be an entire narrative arc.''

Glass has the air of someone who was dropped off at a boarding school long ago and gradually took over the campus. He wears high-top sneakers and designer horn-rimmed specs that lend him a bookish glamour; his thick black hair is interrupted by moments of gray, like that of a boy who has seen something terrible. He says he owns only three pairs of pants, not counting two suits he saves for special occasions. He has lived in the same apartment for 10 years and still pays $465 a month, even if there was a four-month stretch when he forgot to pay.

Money, in the main, has little pull for Glass. After four years of ''This American Life,'' his annual salary has just hit $63,000. He once turned down an offer to do a few Crate & Barrel voiceovers that would have paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for a few hours' work. Tacked above his desk is a letter from Warner Trade Paperbacks, offering him $400,000 to write two books, neither of which specifies any firm topic or due date. A friend in the business has advised Glass that he could easily command a million. ''I still wouldn't do it,'' he says. ''I'm busy.''

Nevertheless, a few detours have tempted Glass. To the amazement of some of his purist radio friends, he's looking into doing a television version of his program. It's still in the early stages; Glass says he needs a network that would give him real creative control. His one vow is to avoid PBS, which, he insists, ''is more beholden to corporate interests than commercial television and should be abolished.'' But the glow of television has attracted him.

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''It wouldn't be like '20/20' or '60 Minutes' or any other shows with numbers in their titles,'' he says. ''The visuals would be impressionistic, pretty -- more like an Errol Morris film.''

Like its creator, ''This American Life'' has spent years running on the cheap. Until recently, the staff worked on equipment so old that it was almost quaint. Each producer was afforded a single audio speaker, which made it impossible to hear if background music was swelling out of control. The sound-editing software, far from being state-of-the-art, was a $300 program popular among amateur musicians.

But the iMac has brought money luck on this gray Chicago afternoon. Glass reads a piece of E-mail from his marketing consultant again and again: Amazon.com has just signed on as a corporate sponsor, contributing a mind-bending $125,000. ''This is amazing,'' Glass says, gratefully patting the top of his computer. ''We've just made our budget.''

Now all his mad dreams can come true. Alix Spiegel, a producer, can get a cheap soundproof wall for her tiny corner of the office. Maybe Glass can even hire someone new, and take pressure off his three producers, all of whom seem to be on the verge of burnout. Glass E-mails a thank-you note to his marketer for the good news. ''You rock, you rock, you rock,'' he types. Glass's hands flap as he shoos the letter away: ''Go! go!''

For all his logistical duties, Ira Glass is a Roland Barthes man down to his socks. What he knows best, besides cutting tape, is how to evoke the pleasure of the text. If you chuckle when he tells you that he majored in semiotics at Brown University ''and it comes in handy every day,'' he'll blink at you a few times, then explain that, yes, it truly does. He describes semiotics as ''a sadly pretentious body of theory about language and narrative'' -- but make no mistake. Glass is a believer. To illustrate the art, he leans in conspiratorially and starts talking in hushed tones: ''A guy wakes up, and it's really quiet. He looks around and gets out of bed; it's really quiet. Walks into the hall . . . really quiet. He keeps walking and goes downstairs . . . it's really quiet. . . .''

The repetition is mesmerizing, and every statement raises 10 questions. Who is the man? What does he want? What's going to happen? Therein lies suspense, a pleasure that can be shaped to happy or ghastly effect, however the teller pleases. There are two people in America who so deliberately mesmerize: Ira Glass and Philip Glass. And they're related (first cousins once removed).

''A sequence . . . a sequence is like a sermon,'' Glass says. ''This happened and that happened and here's what it means. It took me years to learn that. It's a sermon. I feel like someone who went into his basement and invented something that everybody already owned.''

Glass's speech, on radio, is a strange combination of Bobby Kennedy and Paul Harvey. His youthful proclamations dip into subtle insights then leave a pause that, as stage directors like to say, you could drive a truck through. ''In radio, you have two tools,'' he says. ''Sound and silence.'' His life, an unbroken line between semiotics and radio, has taught him that pauses are dead air only in the hands of charlatans and hacks.

''I'm trying to make perfect moments,'' he says. ''And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works -- to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.

''Radio these days is a car people drive at 20 m.p.h.,'' he adds, ''but that no one wants to take for a spin on the freeway.''

But Glass cannot focus solely on radio theory. While he's still putting in vast amounts of time bringing his ''Friends'' skits to life, he gets word that NPR executives are edgy. Is it wise, they wonder, to erode their talent's credibility by using them in satire? Why didn't Glass go through channels?

''In the past, I just called up my friends and said, 'Wanna be in a show?' ''he says, smiling at the oddity at having to persuade the networks to make money. But Glass, after 20 years in the business, has developed a politic side.

''The first thing you have to say is, 'I hear what you're saying,' ''Glass tells me. He picks up the phone to make what will be the first of four days of phone calls to appease the brass of both networks. ''It is like a delicate neurological procedure.''

Glass stands, as he often does when he's on the phone, and calls a marketing figure at PRI. He smiles patiently while he listens. ''I hear what you're saying,'' he says, shifting his weight to and fro, as though he's trying to rock the phone to sleep. ''But we're in a position to be magnanimous and -- yes. Let me think about what you're saying.''

Glass waits a beat before banging down the phone and coughs out a laugh. There's time to make things right. All he really wants to do is produce these spots, to beam them up to Galaxy VI, public radio's satellite 22,000 miles above the world, so they can be pulled down again and used for the forces of good. To him, promos are programs. He wants the pleasure of fixing them and hearing them read by the talent.

Though common sense suggests that NPR might enjoy having the industry's star pledge-producer make them some cash, and that PRI might enjoy borrowing some clout from NPR's famous voices, everyone has a problem with everything. Someone from NPR warns Glass not to use any copy in a news parody that sounds like real news. Another wonders whether ''This American Life'' should be allowed to broadcast the promos Glass himself is creating. Both networks want to know who will be able to use the promos, who will own them.

Glass's natural optimism begins to fade. Nancy Updike, the most senior of the show's three producers, steps into his office. ''Sort of bad news,'' she says. ''Carl Kasell's supervisor said no.''

Glass rubs his face as though a genie might appear. ''And this is even after we were told yes to everything yesterday?'' he asks from behind a hand. Updike explains the catch. Kasell is portraying himself reading news, and the credibility issue is looming -- as is the pledge-break ownership quandary.

In his mild version of a rage, Glass tosses off an E-mail to all concerned with the ''Friends'' fracas. The gist of it is clear: as the man who conceived and organized the promos, found the executive producer of ''Friends,'' contacted all the talent involved and created the sketches, Glass thinks that maybe, just maybe, he should have some say in their distribution.

I ask Glass how he'll budge an entire bureaucracy. The phrase ''going through channels'' alone, in the real world, is at best a nine-day proposition. But Glass is unruffled. Without a trace of sarcasm, he says, ''I am gently trying to nudge them toward the path of righteousness.''

''By getting rough?'' I ask. ''Isn't that what bureaucracies understand?''

''I don't believe that.''

Well into the next day, Glass is haunted by remorse about the E-mail. ''I was slipping into darkness,'' he moans, dragging a palm across his cheek. ''If I behave nicely, all will work out.''

As it happens, Glass's faith is affirmed. All but one of the promos are accepted. ''What happened was a wonderful lesson, did you see?'' he'll say later. ''Everyone came around and did the selfless thing. PRI originally asked, 'What do we get out of this?' And I said, 'Nothing.' Now everybody feels like a hero.''

Ira Glass is smaller and less jumpy in the open air. One damp evening, he saunters up to me in the street outside my hotel, eating a hot dog. ''Want one?'' he asks, before resorting to a semiotic lure. ''It's char-broiled. The fact pattern of this hot dog is that it's completely char-broiled!''

Glass has agreed to drive me around a bit in his black Honda Accord. I've made this request so that I can talk to him without interruption -- without hearing the first half of one thousand interesting remarks. It also occurs to me that I'm most accustomed to hearing his voice in a car.

I try to think what's so different, what is so strangely intimate, about speech in a car. ''Simple,'' Glass says. ''When people talk in a car they don't look at each other. The information enters you in a different way.''

Glass has slept 2 hours of the past 38. But in the dark, eyes out of sight, he is clear as a bell. He tells the story of how he bought this car, and ends in typical Ira Glass puzzlement: ''No one is ever supposed to buy a car without getting the story to go with it, the story of buying the car,'' he says. ''It makes you think . . . when does narrative happen in real life? And why?''

Glass ends his week with little to show for his iMac and cable TV. His existence has not been recrafted. He has watched cable for little more than an hour, having seen ''The Sopranos'' on HBO. The computer has offered its baffling first hour on the Internet. He has worked a lot.

Ten days pass. One morning, I wake to find that someone has left a seven-minute message on my answering machine. It's Glass. He wants to help ''tie up a narrative moment in the story'' -- this story. This time, there's no question of looking at each other as we talk. It is the clearest, most cohesive time I will ever spend with him. His voice issues from my private little radio, as he tells me again the tale of how ''This American Life'' came to be. He speaks of Rick Madden and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WBEZ in Chicago. Glass occasionally forgets that he's not talking to a human being. At one point, he says, ''I may have told you this story -- and stop me if I have. . . .'' Though of course he is on tape, so there's no interrupting him.

The tale is engaging and optimistic. Glass builds a little suspense about the time just before C.P.B. stepped in to finance ''This American Life.'' The moral is that altruism works, that the world bends heliotropically to righteousness. Glass doesn't dislike tragedy, but this story is about his own show, so a happy ending will suffice. This story is about the goodness of Government.

''In general, people think about these Federal agencies . . . and quasi-Federal agencies,'' his voice says, crackling up out of my black box. ''But you never hear about somebody handling something with such skill. It was truly . . . amazing . . . to me. Bye.''

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A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 1999, on Page 6006068 of the National edition with the headline: The Glow at the End of the Dial; Ira Glass Is, Um (Pause, Delete) . . . Listening: The Perfectly Edited World of His 'American Life.'. Today's Paper|Subscribe